“Fatal Vision” goggles aren’t new. Police take them not just to school driver-education events, but to community gatherings. Anyone who has donned them knows how disconcerting they are. Sober people get the message: You really can’t drive as well as you think after a few drinks.

That point is graphically driven home every two years at North Hunterdon High School with the “Every 15 Minutes” program for juniors and seniors.

Each is sadly too commonly found in daily news reports and re-created on TV, in movies and on You Tube. But it’s no longer an abstract when the people “involved” are your friends and classmates, when the parents crying next to the wreck were cheering you on at last week’s game.

Students in Hunterdon today were raised, in large, in a world that works hard at discouraging drinking and driving. Many will heed the warning, moving to walkable towns and cities or appointing a “DD” (alcohol-free designated driver) before a night on the town.

Texting while driving, on the other hand, is a new phenomena that hasn’t carried the stigma and heavy fines and surcharges of drunken driving.

However, West Amwell Patrolman Todd Pantuso — at South’s event police officers accompanied the students on the golf cart course — found that students drove much worse while texting than while wearing the Fatal Vision goggles.

He hopes they remember the hands-on lesson the when slipping behind the wheel. The lives they save could be their own.